The Civil War (TV Series)

[Cross posted from Wonders in the Dark, part of their Television countdown.]

(I'm sorry this is going to look like a homework assignment - but this is a show that feels a bit like a homework assignment, a textbook at least. That isn't a bad thing, of course - it's meant to be informative as well as moving and entertaining, and it is, all of those things.)

What is it?

A historical documentary about the American Civil War, broadcast on PBS in 1990, and a huge success. (Largest ever audience for PBS, apparently.) It made Ken Burns a household name, and elevated Shelby Foote, in particular, to new levels of fame. There are 9 episodes, about 10 hours altogether, with around two hours devoted to each year of the war, with an hour for the build up and an hour of aftermath. It is straightforward history, using primary sources (period photographs and texts by contemporaries) to provide the base for narration and commentary. It digs into the primary sources - Burns' method of showing photographs, panning and zooming around the photo, to pick out details, became iconic, and has entered the language (thanks to photo and video editing software). Texts are read, with similar attention and care, by actors, many well known (Jason Robards Jr., Sam Waterston, Morgan Freeman, etc). The show was very effective as well as popular, and for a while, seemed to be the definitive historical documentary. That, I am sorry to say, isn't quite the case anymore - I will return to that a little later.

How is it as History?

It is quite good. It is essentially an introductory overview of the Civil War; it would make a good textbook in a basic history class. It is, to start, actual history - primary sources and commentary; everything is rooted in those sources, and in analysis by people who root their work in primary sources. It's clear about what is sourced and what is not, and what the sources are, as clear as a television show is going to be. It is a good introduction to the war - it tells what happened, it explains it well, it covers a wide range of experiences of the war. That is important. It is not strictly military or political history: it works in the home front, the day to day lives of solders, technology (of war, medicine, communication, and so on), it covers the role and place of women in the war, it attends to the experiences, attitudes and actions of blacks - slaves, ex-slaves, and free blacks. It is quite good at conveying the lived experience of all these people, on both sides of the war. It is an introduction - if you want details on the technology of killing, or the state of medicine, or the political machinations north and south and overseas, or details about campaigns and battles and strategy and tactics, you will have to go elsewhere - though often, you can go directly to the writers and books being discussed. You can do worse than go to the sources the show presents - read Frederick Douglass or Abraham Lincoln or Mary Chestnut or Grant's Memoirs. And there is certainly an abundant literature dealing with the Civil War.

Still - it is a good introduction. The historical analysis tend to be conventional, reflecting the historical consensus - which is fine, for a survey. But that is where things start to become complicated. It isn't that the show gets the history wrong so much as that arguments about the history of the Civil War are indissociable from the history of the Civil War. More on that later, for sure; for now - let me say that the show came out at a time when the historiography of the Civil War was, itself, changing. You can see this in the emphasis on the social aspects of the war, the emphasis on the lived experiences of the participants - that wasn't new in 1990, but it had not been the consensus on how to do history for very long. And the interpretation of the war had also changed. Burns doesn't wriggle around the question of slavery - that was the cause of the war, and he says so. That is the consensus historical view of the war today, and was in 1990 - but it has not always been. The show's narration gives us the consensus - but leaves out the historiography, leaves out the dissent, and the history of dissent. This is a point I will definitely come back to.

How is it as a film?

What is it as a film? Archival materials, photos and texts, mainly, with added narration and commentary; the photos used both as background and as explicit illustrations of the elements of the story, and "animated," particularly by the famed Ken Burns Effect. The primary texts are themselves animated by being read by expressive voice actors. Over the photos and between the texts are narration and commentary, sometimes as voiceover, often by experts, usually shot in fairly neutral situations - sitting in their office, or front porch, or such - there is not much movement anywhere in the show. There is very little filmed material besides the talking experts - the 1860s were too early, of course, for contemporary film; there is some fascinating footage of veterans gatherings and parades, from much later. Burns also uses a few a few inserts of empty fields, cannons, battlefields and the like, but strictly as background - there aren't even modern shots of the battlefield and locations, that I remember. Few if any. Finally, there are a few recordings of survivors and the children of survivors speaking - these are often quite marvelous.

It is, then, a relatively sober and conservative style of documentary - though one well suited to the material. The Civil War was one of the first large events to be heavily photographed - it is right to use those photographs as the basis for the work. The war left a rich visual record - photographs, drawings, engravings, paintings - Burns uses them to all good effect. It was also fought by a very literate nation - so the collection of texts is also very rich. All kinds or texts, from all levels of society, are here: letters, diaries, memoirs, speeches, political and legal documents, newspaper accounts and editorials, everything, from all levels of society, all types of writers. Private soldiers and their families, officers, politicians, slaves, ex-slaves, free blacks, ministers and essayists, newspapermen, foreign observers, and writers from the barely literate to Walt Whitman and Abraham Lincoln. The scope and variety of texts is wonderful indeed. Finally, all of it is set against music - mostly contemporary with the war, but with some pieces written in the 19th century style  ("Ashokan Farewell", notably). The music, too, is sometimes illustrative (all those ballads about the longing for home), but usually used to set the mood. Maybe sometimes too much for mood and not illustrative enough: you'd think they'd have managed to find some kind of recording of people singing "John Brown's Body" - hard to get more primary a source than that. All of this adds up, sometimes, to a style where the mood overpowers the content - sober, a bit folksy (sometimes more than a “bit” folksy), mournful, though with a celebratory undertone - look what we survived, look what we did, but look what it cost us. Sad but uplifting.

For a while, this style felt like the very model for the Serious Historical Documentary - though even in those days, it was sometimes more of a whipping boy than a model for other filmmakers. (Back in the 90s, I seem to recall a fair amount of this, from both sides.) It's seriousness, folksiness, nostalgia, could all be attacked by political or personal documentarians; and its sobriety, documentary purity, its lack of spectacle, could be attacked by filmmakers looking to liven up the genre. It has not had many imitators. Today, even serious educational documentaries - the kinds of things aired on American Experience, say - lean heavily on reenactments. This isn't an improvement, I fear. Reenactments are incredibly stupid for 20th century documentaries - how can a reenactment match the power of actual footage from WWI or WWII or Vietnam or Chicago 1968? But even 19th century history gains little from the newer styles. How is a show like PBS' The Abolitionists better for having actors pantomiming Garrison and Douglass than it would be if it just read their words and Ken Burnsed over their photographs? I admit that Burns' nostalgia can run a bit thick sometimes, but that is a fault of the tone and sometimes the content, not the devices - change the music (why not use Charles Ives, or the Band? vary it up, but also pull the story forward - show how current the Civil War has remained through the century and a half since it ended), change the narration, and you would have a very different work - but you would still have history. Drop the photos for guys in funny hats play-shooting guns, and you have - what? why not just make a feature film? 

It's hard to think what reenactments add in any case. What stays with you from The Civil War are the photos and the letters, the power of the words written in middle of the war. The primary materials are extremely powerful - resenting them respectfully, with the full emotional power a fine actor can bring, is enough.



And what about its politics?

Politics: well - there's no avoiding politics. There is a line at the very end of the show, when the experts are considering the legacy of the war, who won, what it meant and all. Barbara Fields (who might be the real star of the show, in the end), cites William Faulkner, to the effect that "history is not 'was', it's 'is'" - and adds that the results of the Civil War are still up for grabs. The war has never been resolved. She was right then - she is right today. The Civil War is still in the news, and not just incidentally, but very close to the center of contemporary American politics. We are, as a country, still arguing about what the war meant, what it did - what it was, even - and how to talk about it. It has always been so - the shooting stopped, and the debates began (though the shooting didn't stop for long, and in some ways still hasn't), and they are still going on. (Sometimes, alas, so is the shooting.) The issues coming out of the Civil War are still up for grabs - are we a democracy? are we going to treat everyone in America as Americans? Who will run this country, and for whom?

The history of the war has always been tangled up with politics; political debates have always been tied to historical interpretations of the war. I said earlier that the show appeared at a time when the historiography of the Civil War was changing - at least, at a time when the historiographical changes were filtering into the mainstream. There was a time, as late as the 70s, maybe the 80s, when you could get through high school, maybe even college, and still think the war was fought over state's rights and tariffs, that slavery was a side issue, exaggerated after the fact by northerners looking to make themselves look better, that the whole affair was a terrible, inexplicable tragedy - an act of god, imposed on the country by some impersonal external force, like a terrible storm. That was an interpretation of the war that came from the south, after the war, especially after Reconstruction. It is partly a way to shift blame away from the former confederates - but also part of the political struggles after the war, to undo the results of the war. There is no way to separate Lost Cause history from the reinstatement of legal white supremacy in the south - it is all tied to the that.

One of Shelby Foote's most famous remarks is that the war changed the grammar of how the United States was referred to. Before the war, people said, the United States ARE; after the war, they said, the United States IS. It is an excellent point - but it leaves out a lot. It obscures the fact that one side of the war was fighting explicitly against that IS. But it also hides a more sinister meaning (which I don't think Foote intended) - the meaning Dixon and Griffith made explicit in The Clansman/Birth of a Nation. It is that the story of the post-war years was the story of forging a nation of whites against blacks. Civil war history after the war, especially southern history, was directed toward reconciling north and south, but at the expense of reestablishing and strengthening the difference between Black and White. The Lost Cause version of history downplays the role of slavery, erasing the confederates' own acknowledgment that slavery was the cause they were fighting for; downplays the role of freeing the slaves in the north. (How could it be? the north fought to preserve the union, emancipation wasn't part of the plan until 1863, and it was always controversial.) Making slavery secondary to the war also makes the post-war amendments (#13, 14, 15) secondary - they become technical changes to the constitution, not the radical reimagining of democracy they might be taken for. It stresses the heroism of the south, and the soldiers on all sides; stresses the shared suffering of the war; stresses the processes of reconciliation after the war. But it is always a reconciliation of north and south, blue and gray - Joseph Wheeler serving in the Spanish American war. And it's all too often, reconciliation of north and south at the expense of black and white.

This interpretation of the Civil War was something like orthodoxy for most of the 20th century. That began to change in the 1950s and 60s, though mainly among academics - it took a while for the new historical consensus to reach the mainstream. The Civil War reflects the new consensus - Burns and company leave no doubt that slavery was the cause of the war, and that the accomplishment of the war was abolishing slavery, making possible, at least, a new birth of freedom. If the show has a problem, it's in leaving out the historiography of the Civil War. Maybe that is beyond the scope of a TV series about the war - but it is important. It is easier to understand why it is important to acknowledge that slavery started the war when you know the history of why slavery isn't considered the cause. The confederates knew it was the cause - they said so - and Burns is sure to cite their articles of secession, the speeches by men like Alexander Stephens, that stated as clearly as you like that they were fighting to defend slavery. Leaving out an account of how that changed leaves room for misinterpretation of the show. The show has a melancholy, but celebratory tone, that contains many of the elements of the old Lost Cause history. The sense of war as an act of god - the celebration of the country's ability to come back together - many of the personalizing anecdotes Shelby Foote tells in the show. These things are good - the show does include southern voices and perspectives, apolitical voices, north and south - it should. And it's a reminder that there is plenty in the Lost Cause version of history that is not wrong - but it's also why I think it is crucial to explain the history of the debates. Without the historiography, you can't separate the lies of the Lost Cause (denying the role of slavery in the war, denying the role African Americans played in the war - denying, ultimately, the radical and - let's not mince words - completely admirable importance of the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments) from what is true. (The human experience of the war in the south; the importance of reconciliation after the war and so on.)

In the end?

How does it end? I don't know how I should end. The war hasn't really ended - how can a show about it end, or an essay about the show about the war? "The past isn't dead. It isn't even past." Ken Burns ended - twice, right? With Barbara Fields invoking Faulkner's "history is is" - then with Foote talking about making the war the most important war ever, and reading an old soldier waxing nostalgic for the war, over footage of a 1938 reunion at Gettysburg. The juxtaposition is odd when you think about it - Fields expresses the view that the war was about what the country would be and that the fight is still going on; Foote, himself, and quoting Barry Bentson, confederate soldier, puts is squarely in the past, romanticizes it, dreams of reconciliation under the two flags. Foote's ending feels satisfying - sad, but celebratory, a story of a country breaking itself apart and bringing itself back together again, through terrible cataclysm - but it also feels false. Or - a reconciliation explicitly at the expense of the people the war was in fact, fought over (slaves, blacks), and at the expense of the result of the war, those post-war amendments. The show as a whole sometimes is still seen as being too devoted to Foote's version - tragedy and reconciliation, not revolution and (thwarted, but still powerful) liberation - though as history, it hews closer to Fields' views. Maybe this would have worked better if they had been willing to let her have the last word: reverse those last two clips - because old soldiers dreaming of reconciliation is something to value; but understanding that the war was the central event in American history, and still is, is more important. The past is not dead; it's not even past.

Here is Foote's ending:


And here is Fields':

Long weekend Friday Ten

Memorial Day weekend is here, with actual seasonal weather! Hooray! fire up that grill! My weekend is getting an early start, so I don't have much to add here - enjoy it... Don't forget to remember those who've gone, and especially those who've gone serving their country, and maybe especially those who went saving our country from division and freeing the slaves - don't forget Decoration Day.

And with that - some random songs to consider...

1. Wire - Smash
2. Jacques Brel - Vesoul
3. Slits - Enemy Numero Uno
4. Kinks - Superman
5. Mono - Gone
6. 13th Floor Elevators - Kingdom of Heaven
7. Nina Simone - My Baby Just Cares for Me
8. Battles - Futura
9. Boris - Window Shopping
10. Nick Cave & Bad Seeds - God is in the House

Video? first - in case I don't get back in here before the holiday - here is Odetta singing the Battle Hymn of the Republic:



And some some singer-songwiriter goodness, starting with Jacques Brel:



And - here's Nina Simone:



And Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, on Jules Holland:

Juneteenth

Today is the 150th anniversary of Juneteenth - June 19, 1865, the day Union troops arrived in Galveston Texas with news that the war was over and the slaves had been freed. General Gordon Granger read a general order announcing their freedom:

The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free. This involves an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them becomes that between employer and hired labor. The freedmen are advised to remain quietly at their present homes and work for wages.

And there was, indeed, very great rejoicing. Over the years it became an annual celebration - though one that perhaps grew bittersweet over the years. The United States won the Civil War, but the Confederate states won the Reconstruction - removing many rights from the freed blacks, imposing an apartheid regime in the south, that only started to be undone in the 1950s and 1960s. In recent years, Juneteenth has again become an important celebration in some places - a state holiday in Texas even - and we would not go wrong as a country to make it a national holiday. It is an excellent place to mark the end of the Civil War, and the good that came out of the Civil War - a subject that deserves more celebration.

Right now in particular. The shooting at the AME church in Charleston, SC, is a reminder, if we need one, that the Civil War has not really gone away. A white man, an open racist, goes into a Black church and murders 9 people, spouting off as he did it - “I have to do it. You’re raping our women and taking over the country. You have to go.” He seems to have been an over-determined piece of work - racist, drug addled thug, a time bomb waiting to go off - but when he went off, he went off in a Black church pastored by a state senator - whatever he might have been as an individual, his act was political terrorism. Which is nothing new: the south has practiced political terrorism from the day the Civil War ended (of course before that, they practiced terrorism against Blacks for some centuries, though it was all more or less legal), to restore and maintain white supremacy.

There's no escaping it. And this attack is depressingly continuous with all the violence against African Americans - it is continuous with the police murders that have been in the news (Michael Brown and Eric Garvin and Walter Scott and Freddie Gray). It is continuous with the state it occurred in - which still flies the Confederate flag. You can't get around that fact: South Carolina continues to celebrate its role in killing 650,000 plus Americans in defense of slavery and white supremacy - it is a bit disingenuous to lament some free-lancer adding 9 more to the toll, when you do that. Ta-Nehisi Coates sums it up, as he usually does: "The flag that Roof embraced, which many South Carolinians embrace, does not stand in opposition to this act—it endorses it." At some point, even the parts of the United States unhappy with the results of the Civil War will need to accept its outcome.

In the meantime, we can celebrate its outcome. Forget the bad news for a while, and have a happy Juneteenth.

Decoration Day

Happy Memorial Day!

As I am wont to do, I am inclined to think about the origins of holidays on holidays. This one began in the wake of the Civil War - officialy in the north in 1868; less officially, and at various times and places in the south in 1866 or so. And one of the first instances came in Charleston, South Carolina, where a large number of freed slaves (mainly) gathered to pay tribute to the Union soldiers who had died at the Hampton Park Race Course, which had been used as a prison camp during the war. The dead had been buried there - the freedmen cleaned and landscaped the grounds and gathered for a ceremony on May 1, 1865, to honor the Martyrs of the Race Course. There may or may not have been any direct connection between that and the commemorations to come, but it set the patterns - parades, memorialization of the war dead - and I suppose an attempt to claim the holiday for a political purpose. In this case a good purpose - the end of slavery and preservation of the union. But in coming years, the south would try to claim it as a celebration of the "lost cause".

Over the years, the original significance of the day has been replaced by a more general day of remembrance for the war dead - we do have more wars to remember now. That is a good thing to remember - but it is good, too, to go back to the origins. I admit too that I feel this more strongly on Decoration Day (and Armistice Day) than most holidays - the Civil War is, really, the foundational moment of the United States. We existed for 87 odd years before that, but the Civil War is what defined us (or at least, defined us as something worth being.) We live with its effects more than we live with the effects of any other event in our history, even now. Which links it to Armistice Day - since WWI had this impact on the rest of the world. everything since - bigger or smaller - flows from the Great War, as it flows from the Civil War in this country. And so - keep in mind where this came from, and maybe, the cause behind it.



Here, then, is Orson Welles, explaining and reciting The Battle Hymn of the Republic:

The Assassination of Lincoln

150 years ago today, John Wilkes Booth shot Abraham Lincoln in the third act of The American Cousin at the Ford Theater... (I pick on the lede - but it's actually a pretty sharp piece of reporting - with the writer also turning over the assassin's gun to the authorities.) Coming 5 days after Lee's surrender, this was a horrible shock to the country - his funeral would be the occasion of intense mourning.

It was a terrible event - and in retrospect, it becomes even more appalling. The Vice President was Andrew Johnson, a Tennessee Democrat, who had been placed on the ticket as a symbol of unity with the south, and who was already something of a problem. He was given to intemperate remarks - he was considered more vindictive than Lincoln. He'd also made a fool of himself at his inauguration, getting good and plastered and giving a drunken blur of a speech - since then, he'd stayed out of sight and hoped everyone would forget about him. And now he was president. And as president, he set about trying to reconstruct the Union, in a way that brought the old southern slaveholders back to power, let them pass laws that virtually reinstated slavery under new names... The Republicans in congress were having none of this, and passed their own laws, and when he vetoed them, they overrode his vetoes, and when things went far enough, they impeached him.

It was a disaster, the United States government breaking down at a time when it needed to be very sharp, to deal with reintegrating an unrepentant south into the country without surrendering the freedom won by the war. The radicals in congress eventually were able to implement their policies - but only for a few years, and with much of the gains of the war undone at the end of Reconstructions. Could Lincoln have done better? His stated policy toward the south was probably closer to Johnson's than to the radical Republicans - but he was also a better politician, and had a better sense of doing what needed to be done. It seems likely he would have done far more to protect the rights of Blacks after the war - his policies had evolved steadily toward more radical positions toward slavery and race, and it's reasonable to expect that would have continued. But saying that - it is also possible that he would have been hung up on the same issues that destroyed Johnson. It wasn't just Johnson's policies that undid him - it was the villainy of the south, who did everything they could to undo the end of slavery. Johnson's problem, and Lincoln's if he lived, was not so much the radical Republicans as it was the former confederates - Johnson was willing to work with the confederates; would Lincoln have been? would he have been able to get them to accept free Blacks, Black voting, and so on? He might have - but it's no guarantee. And if they didn't cooperate, they were going to come into conflict with the congressional Republicans, the Thaddeus Stevens, Ben Wade, Charles Sumner types - they had won the war, and were not about to give in now. It is possible, in the end, that had Lincoln lived, the next couple years would have undone a lot of his legacy - maybe not likely, but possible.

But none of that happened. Lincoln died, and history went where it did (and where it went ended up being mostly bad - 100 years wasted, basically). And Lincoln's life itself remains as one of the greatest in this countries history. He did win the Civil War - more than any other president won any of our other wars. He was, fairly early in the war, the sharpest strategist - understanding the need to use the Union's advantages in number and material to crush the Confederacy, understanding the need for action and aggression. And as a politician, he kept a very fragile and contentious country together - kept it committed to a bloody and destructive war, until it won. And finally, he freed the slaves - he recognized the reasons for the war, and accepted them, and imagined, during the war, the opportunities it afforded, of making the United States worthy of its imagined view of itself. We were not, before 1863, or 1865, a very admirable country - we were not free, however much we wanted to say we were. Slavery poisoned us, almost incurably - and Lincoln saw that, and moved to change it, and to reinvent the country as what it should have been. That matters. Even if Reconstruction failed, the war, and Lincoln, remained as a reminder of what we were trying to become. We have a model of what the country should be, what it can be, something we can live up to. Abraham Lincoln works pretty well for that.

Appomattox Court House

150 years ago today, Robert E. Lee surrendered formally to the US Government at Appomattox Courthouse, and though the Civil War dragged on quite a while longer, this was where it ended. Lee's army was the Confederacy, really, especially after Nashville (maybe even Atlanta - once Hood left the city, his army was irrelevant, in terms of changing the ending) - and facing the facts and laying down arms put the rebellion to rest.

I have mostly written about the military aspects of the war in this series - I will have to turn to the politics as we go forward. (I hope to go forward: I need to read about Reconstruction, it's something I don't know enough about. I hope that is reflected on this blog - probably not tied to anniversaries so much, but I hope to continue to write about the period.) But for now, one more military post... There wasn't much left to the Confederacy in the spring of 1865. Sherman was marching where he would in the Carolinas; forces in the west were equally unfettered; only Lee offered much in the way of resistance. Dug in in Petersburg, he could still fight - though Grant was able to stretch his lines more and more until they were almost ready to break anyway. At the same time, they were almost cut off from supplies, not that there were many places left producing food in the South. They were beaten - but Lee kept trying. With spring, Grant renewed his pressure on Lee - mostly using Phil Sheridan to do the dirty work - they got around the Confederate lines, they got them out of the trenches and thrashed them when they did. That left the trenches too weak to be held - and on April 2, the Union broke through. Lee made one more try to extend the way, thinking he could make a dash to the Carolinas, to join Joe Johnston's army there and maybe be able to beat one of the Union armies. It was probably not very likely - either Grant or Sherman had more men than the combined rebel armies could muster - well equipped and well armed veteran forces unintimidated by the Rebels, led by generals who could count, knew they had all the cards, and were prepared to fight it out to the end. But it never came to that - never mind their fighting abilities, the days were long past when the Rebels were able to outrun Union troops, and Grant and Sheridan had no intention of letting them. They harried Lee with everything they had, and with Grant and Sheridan driving them, the Union army moved effectively - and ran Lee down with ease. There was some fighting - it didn't matter, Lee was out of options. So he stopped.

Grant, probably understanding Lincoln's desires to get the war finished and start the process of undoing its damage, gave generous terms. News spread, and other armies followed in surrender, usually also receiving good terms - and the war wound down. There was, maybe, for a moment, a chance that the aftermath of the war would be successful - the means of surrender went a long way toward making reconciliation possible between the two sides. But that was ruined quickly by John Wilkes Booth - and it's probably too much to hope to think the South, having just fought a suicidal war to preserve slavery, would accept any kind of decent settlement for Blacks after the war. Instead, they began fighting to suppress the freed slaves, while redefining the war to be about something other than treason in defense of slavery - a campaign that was a good deal more successful than the war itself had been. (And is still being fought today.) But that's all in the future, on April 9, 1865 - for that moment, for that week, maybe, there was peace and hope.

Sherman's March to the Sea

I have been neglecting my Civil War posts - but I can't ignore Sherman's March to the Sea. This week is the end - he reached Savannah, Georgia on December 21, 1864.

Sherman:



The story - after taking Atlanta, Sherman stayed there; Confederate General John B. Hood took his army west, after a while, hoping to cut Sherman's lines, renew the war in the west (the Confederacy was being sliced up by this time, but that still left big chunks of land under their control - geography was their friend), and generally - find something useful to do. Sherman chased him around for a while, but not long - he gave it up, figuring that the Union forces in the west were more than adequate for the task. Instead, Sherman would take his army and head for the Atlantic - cutting the Confederacy into smaller pieces; wrecking their means of supporting the war; and teaching them what it meant to lose a war. So off they went, and they made gruesome work of it.

Behind him, John Schofield and George Thomas handled Hood easily enough. At the end of November, Hood wrecked his army with direct attacks on Schofield's entrenchments at the Franklin. Hood didn’t have much left after that, but Thomas took a couple weeks to finish him off - but on December 15 and 16, at the Battle of Nashville, he attacked, and didn’t leave much doubt about it. Hood’s army was ruined, taken out of the war, and the Union got on with the job of finishing the Rebels off.

Sherman’s army was already well on their way by then, though no one knew it. When he headed east from Atlanta, he cut off all ties with the rest of the United States. No communications, only the supplies he could carry - but his armies lived off the land, while wrecking it for the Confederacy. They tore Georgia apart - destroying everything of use to the enemy - the food supplies (still producing in this part of the country), industry, transportation, everything. By this time in the war, the places that had seen fighting - Virginia (especially the north), big chunks of Tennessee, Mississippi and such - had been ravaged for years; they could not support what was left of the Confederate armies. But the deep south had been spared - it still could supply Lee and the other armies still in the field - but not when Sherman was done with them. He destroyed that resource base, destroyed the transportation need to get supplies to Virginia. And on top of that, a big part of his goal was to show them the war was over except for the formalities - that Union armies could come and go as they pleased and do as they pleased...

It's hard to argue with the results. Sherman certainly demonstrated that the confederacy was beaten, and had best give up. He wrecked Georgia, and even if Lee and Johnston hadn't been finally beaten in the field in early 1865, they would probably have had no means of carrying on much longer. They were running out of room anyway; and by the end of Sherman's march, he'd reached the southern border of Virginia. At the same time, though the march wrought havoc on the south, there wasn't a lot of direct violence - property was ruined; lives were generally spared.

Still. A thing that works in one context might not be right for another; a thing that seems just and effective in one place, might not be so in another. You can detect the ghost of Sherman and his marchers in many of the wars we've fought since. It was immediately applied to the plains Indians - Sherman and Sheridan (who did the same thing to the Shenandoah) were in charge of those campaigns, and adopted a similar scorched earth policy. You can see its legacy in World War II's strategic bombing campaigns - hoping to destroy the enemies' ability to make war; and to demonstrate to the civilians that they were losing, and should surrender now. But whatever you think of what Sherman did - those later campaigns were a different sort of affair. Starting with the fact that the campaigns against the Sioux and Cheyenne and such were aimed as much against people as resources - they were genocidal, or at least willing to be genocidal - and the talk was certainly genocidal. And in WWII, there was no pretense at sparing the lives of civilians - bombing campaigns were meant to kill people, as much as to destroy war resources. No one pretended otherwise.

They were terrorism. And so was Sherman,strictly speaking. He certainly thought so - whatever he might have called it, his goal was to teach he south that they had lost, and break their will to continue fighting. That is what terrorism is - attacking not military targets in an effort to break the will of the population to fight. And - it might have worked in 1864 - though the history of the south after the Civil War tends to undermine that theory. It certainly didn't work in WWI or WWII - Zeppelin bombings didn't break the English in the Great War; the Blitz didn't break them in the second war; neither Germany or Japan broke, on the home front, in WWII, for all the devastation raised on them from the sky. Hiroshima and Nagasaki might have convinced the Emperor to intervene to force his more suicidal officers to surrender - but that is all. Even on the plains - the US did destroy the power of the plains tribes, but they did it by sheer force of numbers, and by obliterating their food supply. Which is what really worked against Georgia and the Shenandoah in 1864 (and worked against the Japanese in 1945) - destroying resources made it impossible for the CSA or Imperial Japan to resist. (Germany was beaten by main force: they maintained their war production fairly well to the end. In WWI, they were beaten largely by the blockade, which also ruined their resources, and starved the people to the point where they did turn against their government. That, in fact, might come closer to a parallel with Sherman - the British blockade starved them, without killing people openly; as did Sherman. Maybe economic warfare does work, when not coupled with (too much) open violence - bombs made people fight harder; hunger convinces them that getting rid of the Tsar or the Kaiser can save them. A thought anyway.)

So in the end - you have an event that in itself was very effective - not all that excessive - and, well - the Confederacy deserved what they got, and a good deal more. But - but - the precedents were bad; and in the back of my mind, it's hard to avoid the thought that what really won the war (in this part of the South) was the combination of John Hood heading of for nowhere and Schofield and Thomas blasting his army to shreds. Once the southern armies were gone - the war was won. Sherman gets the press - but Thomas and Schofield (and Grant and Sheridan) did the work.

Cedar Creek (and Ypres I)

I've been terrible in keeping up with my Civil War posts lately - but need to put something up today, the anniversary of the Battle of Cedar Creek. When last we left U.S. Grant, at the Battle of the Crater, he had failed, yet again, to break through Lee's lines outside Petersburg - and he was about to stop trying. He settled down to hold Lee in place, and look for ways to win the war elsewhere - the trenches let him do that - though they also let Lee send some of his men off to try to win the war elsewhere. Specifically, he sent Jubal Early to the Shenandoah Valley, to see what mischief they could make. They made their share - marching up to Washington, firing on the city itself, causing panic and fear in all but Lincoln and Grant (Lincoln went to see the fighting, and terrified the Union Generals by peering out at the rebels over the parapets.) Grant sent an army corps (the VI corps - which by this time was probably the best unit in the army); later he sent Phil Sheridan and most of their cavalry, and sent them to do their worst to Early. They did quite a bit - thrashing the Rebels at the battle of Winchester in September - then a couple days later at Fisher's Hill - this left Early's army in ruins, and Sheridan set out to make the Shenandoah Valley waste. Anticipating Sherman's march to the sea, Sheridan marched through the valley, burning crops, destroying barns and mills, turning what had been a major source of supply for the Confederacy into ruins. At the bend of this, thinking that Early was done, Sheridan went to Washington, and started planning to bring the Army of the Potomac men back to Grant.

But Early had other ideas. He had been reinforced - and he knew he had to do something, since he was running out of supplies - so he attacked. In the event, the attack went splendidly - he found that the Union army was not keeping close watch on their left flank: the ground was rough, they though it would discourage the Rebels - but Early was an old Jackson underling, and took that kind of situation for an opportunity. So they attacked, and caved in the Union left, and forced the whole army into retreat. There was heavy fighting, especially when the Rebels ran into the VI corps - but the Federals were drive steadily back.

Meanwhile, Sheridan was in Winchester, a dozen or so miles away. By 9 in the morning (after 3 hours or so to it), he heard enough of the noise to decide to get moving - he rode south, and as he did, realized there was a battle going on. So off he went, at full speed, arriving somewhere around 10:30. He found the lines fairly stable - the VI corps was holding their lines; the rebels had called a halt to their attack, to regroup - to recollect their men, who had been looting the Union camps. Sheridan set about organizing a counterattack - it was ready later that afternoon, and when it came, it was overwhelming. He attacked on the flanks with cavalry, then straight ahead with infantry - there was a period of heavy fighting, then the Rebels collapsed, the cavalry got into their rear, and the rout was on.

And that was that. This was the end of Confederate efforts in the Valley - it was always a strategy doomed by long odds: the Union had very large advantages in numbers, everywhere - so when the Confederates sent away men to fight elsewhere, Grant could send away more men. The very trenches that allowed Lee to dispatch parts of his army to try to find other opportunities allowed the Yankees to dispatch more men to beat the Rebels in detail. Which is what they did - here and elsewhere. Whenever the Confederates came out of their trenches in 1864, they were thrashed mightily. They were outnumbered, and increasingly outgunned - the union cavalry was starting to carry repeaters, and starting to operate as a powerful offensive force on their own. The cavalry itself was becoming a decided Union advantage - especially here, in a fairly mobile warfare, where cavalry was deployed as an offensive force. Their mobility, their firepower told.

It might be enough to make you think that cavalry was still a viable arm of the military! A delusion we might want to visit again in the next couple days - 50 years after the battle of Cedar Creek, the First Battle of Ypres started, October 19, 1914. That would mark the end, really, of mobile warfare on the Western Front - or more precisely, the end of warfare in the open. But we can come back to that - the Battle of Ypres lasted for a month. But I will end with this - no one in Europe paid much attention to what happened in the Civil War; if they had - they probably would have looked at battles like Winchester and Cedar Creek, with their decisive cavalry actions, and saw vindication for their ideas about offense. What they would not have noticed, since they never noticed it, is that what really started to separate union cavalry at the end of the Civil war, was their firepower - Sharps, Spencer and Henry rifles, breechloaders and repeaters - which would change everything, more than anyone could conceive in 1864, and, tragically, even in 1914.

The Fall of Atlanta

Today is the 150th anniversary of the fall of Atlanta, the event, more than any other single event, that marked the end of any chance the Confederacy had to win the Civil War. Militarily, the issue was probably not in doubt - but there was an election in 1864, and Abraham Lincoln stood a chance of losing, enough of a chance that he made serious plans about what to do in case he lost. His opponent was George McClellan, one time self-declared savior of the republic (though to be fair, he was not alone in thinking he was chosen to save the country) - McClellan proved a terrible battlefield general, with no stomach for the war - and politically very squeamish about pushing the war into political realms. But it was a political war, more and more, and the Democratic party, by 1864 was becoming very defeatist, not least because they had no desire to win a war that would free the slaves and make citizens of all black men. McClellan himself didn't go as far as the party did - he was not prepared to abandon the war or the south - but if he won, he would have been hard pressed to continue the war, and in any case, he was not a very forceful leader.

And the voting looked like a close thing, there for awhile. Grant's Virginia campaign was a bloodbath that ended in a siege of Petersburg. Sherman's George campaign brought less bloodshed (as both sides had more room to maneuver, and more inclination to do so), but appeared to be ending in just as much of a stalemate as the east. But the Confederate government saw things differently - they did not see the advantages of dragging out the campaign as far as it would go - they wanted to win a battle and drive the Yankees off... So back in July, they put John B. Hood in command of the Atlanta defenses, under the clear assumption that he would take the battle to the Federals - he did, fighting a series of bloody battles, that he lost, making the outcome inevitable. And on September 2, he set fire to the city and marched away, and Sherman had Atlanta, and fairly won.

There was a lot more killing to come. Hood headed off west and pestered the Union troops in Tennessee for some time - ending in more bloodbaths, at Franklin and Nashville. Lee held on in the east another 6 plus months, but his situation was desperate. Campaigns in the Shenandoah went for the Union. Sheridan in the east and Sherman in the west would eventually go on scorched earth campaigns to try to starve out the Confederate armies (And punish the Confederate civilians). And so on. But there was no changing the ending, really, after Atlanta fell, and Lincoln's reelection became assured. And so, today - it is worth remembering and celebrating.

Battle of the Crater

There may not be a more depressing battle in the Civil War than the Battle of the Crater, fought 150 years ago today. What happened? Basically, a regiment of Pennsylvania coal miners got the notion of digging tunnel under the rebel lines at Petersburg, where the two armies had settled down to trench warfare. Their commander, named Henry Pleasants, took the project in hand - took it to his commander (Ambrose Burnside, one of the worst generals of the war), who approved - and they set to work. They dug a mine under the Rebel lines - very effectively, quickly, and without being detected - everything was set to blow the thing sky high. And behind the lines, Burnside was having one of his better moments - planning the attack, specifically training one of his divisions to make the attack, and take advantage of the expected breach int he Rebel lines. But - this is where it gets depressing. Not that it failed (as it did) - but how it failed. Burnside chose his largest and freshest division to lead the attack - a division of US Colored Troops. But when the army's commander, George Meade, found out - he panicked. He had never liked the idea of the mine - his engineers thought the tunnel would be impossible to dig; no one in the Union high command thought much of Burnside - if he liked the idea, it had to be a bad one. So Meade was not invested in the attack at all, didn't think it would work, and was not about to be attacked in the press for putting Colored Troops in an impossible situation. He told Burnside to pick someone else - Burnside put up a fight - but Grant backed up Meade (he didn't think much of Burnside or the mine either) - and that was that.

It is painful to think about it - to read about it - to read what happened next. There were other chances to win the war - Grant's campaign to get to Petersburg probably came the closest, and the initial fighting around the city in the middle of June was probably the worst lost chance of the war. As it would happen, the mine in fact did break the rebel line - though it was hardly a given that they could have taken Petersburg even with the break. But the nature of this failure, that's what really gets you. The ingenuity of the plan - the effectiveness of the mining itself - the mere fact that Ambrose Burnside showed initiative (or recognized it in others) - the fact that he had a chance to do something right for once, and mostly did it - his moral courage in choosing the Colored Troops.... And the whole thing brought to grief by the short-sightedness and prejudice and moral cowardice of Meade and Grant. And of course, Burnside reverting to type: forced to change divisions to lead the attack, he left it to chance - got stuck with the worst men, the worst general in the corps, who proceeded to fail spectacularly.

The fight itself was a disaster, except for the start. The mine went undetected - was packed with powder - there were anxious moments when the fuse went out, but it was relit, and then the thing went up and went up well. The confederate lines were obliterated, along with a good part of the hill - leaving a huge crater where the rebels had been. The Union troops attacked, led by the division of one James Ledlie - and things started going to hell. Ledlie himself spent the battle behind the lines with a bottle; his men went forward in broken and piecemeal fashion, and did very little to exploit the fact that there were no rebels left anywhere near the front. The confederates recovered quickly, and started to counter attack - as they did, more Union troops came up, with little more organization than the first wave, and soon found themselves bottled up. Finally, the Colored Troops joined the fight, and made an attack, but by now the rebels had formed a very strong line - they repelled the attacks, and forced almost all of Burnside's corps into the crater itself, where they slaughtered them. Especially the black troops, who were murdered in cold blood, as often as not. And so it ended - a complete disaster.

It didn't need to be. And not much needed to be different - letting the Colored Troops lead the attack, as they were prepared to do, would have done much to exploit it. They were ready - they knew to fan out beyond the mine, to roll up all the subsidiary trenches and break the rebel army apart - they would have won something. They were prevented from trying, and sent in late to their doom - another in the long line of disgraceful treatments of blacks in this country.

They could have won something at the Crater - though probably not the war. The problem was, as it had been at the Bloody Angle, and as it would be all through World War I - even if you broke a trench line, it was almost impossible to do much more. You could break a line - but once you did, you came up against a simple limit: there was no way to move troops through a battle zone faster than the human body could move. Maybe if you could get past the trenches, but that was very difficult - even in 1864, the area behind a line of trenches was a maze of more trenches, strongpoints, communication tunnels and all the rest. That's what Burnside's men found when they got past the crater itself - more trenches and holes and what not. They ran afoul that as much as they ran afoul the confederates. This was bad in 1864 - by 1914 (once everyone was dug in), it was even worse. Miles of trenches extended behind the main lines - you could break the front line, you could get through some of the zone behind - but you could never get far enough that there wouldn't be a new trench line waiting for you eventually. In 1864, Burnside used a mine; in 1916, everyone would use artillery to obliterate the front lines - but the results were the same. The front lines would be obliterated - the armies would move forward - the enemy would regroup and counterattack - both sides would suffer unimaginable casualties. The lines never moved. Burnside and AP Hill didn't have machine guns in 1864, so only some 4,500 Union troops were lost (out of 13,000 attackers), and 1,500 confederates - but the results were the same. The lines didn't move an inch. They wouldn't move an inch, until April 1865, when the confederates didn't have enough men left to prevent Grant from going around them; or 1918, when the Allies had tanks and millions of Americans and the Germans were out of men. Tanks, of course, changed everything - because now you could move through a battle zone, fully armored, at speed. That was a long way away.

The Battle of the Crater was the end of Ambrose Burnside, as a general anyway. (He went on to be a senator and a governor after the ware, so it wasn't all bad.) James Ledlie was done as well, drummed out of the army as a drunk. It was also the last time Grant tried anything like a direct attack on the rebel lines - after this, he accepted the siege and tried other things. Soon, he would detach part of his army with Phil Sheridan to run down Jubal Early's army in the Shenandoah Valley. Sherman would be able to take Atlanta - things would move ahead, while Grant held Lee in place.

Unfortunately, Europeans would consider this war something of a backwater feud - they would ignore what happened in Petersburg, and try to fight in the open in 1914. It took a while for that to play out, but it did - and once everyone dug in, that was that. (Their real mistake might have been something different - missing what had changed since 1864 (or 1871, and the Franco-Prussian war): the development of a true industrialized war machine - mass produced weapons, trains, the ability to bring the masses of the country into the war. The reason the siege of Petersburg is different from the siege of France in 1914 is that Germany, France and Britain managed to mobilize millions of men, keep them in action for 4 years, and make lines across the whole of France.) But all that mobilization, and all the means of moving men across large distances in 1914, still didn't solve the problem of Petersburg - you still couldn't move men through a war zone by any means but their feet. Cavalry didn't help until you got past the trenches - no one could get past all the trenches. (Until those tanks and Americans turned up.) So - size and logistics made the whole western front a siege: made it easy to hold, but everyone kept trying to break it - none of them would seem to grasp that there was nothing they could do, no way to get through all the trenches.

But that's another war (one that started 100 years ago Monday.) Just one that could have profited from the lessons of the Crater.

Kennesaw Mountain

Today is the 150th anniversary of the Battle of Kennesaw Mountain, one of the largest and most significant battles of the Atlanta Campaign. I have been giving short shrift to Sherman's campaign in the west in my attempts to follow along with 1864. There are reasons - ranging from the relative fame of the eastern battles (Grant vs. Lee and all that), to the books I've been able to find to read, to my background - reading Bruce Catton's Army of the Potomac books in 5th grade made me the nerd I am... But a big part of it is that the western campaign did not have the kind of cataclysmic battles the east had. Triggering posts on anniversaries favors those kinds of events - there aren't as many of them in the west, and they weren't as dramatic. It was a very different campaign in the west - Sherman was determined to avoid the kinds of frontal assaults on fortifications that caused so much havoc in the wast; his opponent, Joseph Johnston, was just as determined to avoid any kind of fighting out of trenches. So Sherman maneuvered and Johnston defended...

And so it went. Johnston started the campaign in a very strong position - Sherman sent his armies marching around him, and Johnston retreated, rather than be cut off. He had new lines prepared to the south - Sherman flanked him again - he retreated again. And so on. Kennesaw mountain, just outside Marietta Georgia, was the fourth defensive position Johnston occupied - and it looked to be more of a problem for Sherman than the others. It was a very strong position in itself - a defensive line built along the top of the mountain and the ridges around it - but more than that, it was in a place Sherman was going to find it hard to get around. By this time, the Union army was well inside Georgia, dependent on one rail line for supply - Sherman had doubts about his ability to conduct any kind of flanking maneuver away from the railroad, and Johnston had him blocked on the railroad. So he decided to try breaking the lines. There were other considerations - Sherman had been trying to slide around the ends of the rebel lines, and found that his own lines were starting to get very thin - he reasoned that if he was thin, the rebels, with half as many men, should be even thinner. If he attacked, then, at several points of the line, while demonstrating against the whole line - there was a chance that someone could break the lines. So - on June 27, the union army attacked.

It went about as well as frontal attacks went in the east. The attackers went in - the defenders cut them down - the attackers either went back or dug in where they were stopped. There were places where the Union soldiers got to the confederate lines, engaged in some nasty close in combat - but they never came close to breaking the lines. In fact, the results are not that different from the big final attack at Cold Harbor - Sherman's men lost about 3000 casualties, in an hour or two of fighting, without a thing to show for it; the rebels a fraction of that. Like Cold Harbor, the attacks were piecemeal - that was by design at Kennesaw Mountain. Sherman attacked with 3 or 4 divisions, on fairly narrow fronts - the hope was to punch a hole in the lines, and send in reinforcements to exploit the breakthrough. It didn't work - it was just about impossible to break an entrenched line in any circumstances - and when it failed, Sherman called off the attacks. The attacking forces were cut to pieces - the rest of the army avoided most of the fighting. The Yankees dug in again, and waited for dark, and went back to siege warfare....

But in the end, Sherman won the day anyway. He'd ordered part of his army around the far left of Johnston's line, as a pure distraction - but this flanking movement worked. They got in behind the rebels, giving the Yankees a starting point to continue the flinching movement - and Sherman started moving the rest of his army around in that direction. And so, a few days after the battle, Johnston was obliged to abandon another defensive line, falling back even closer to Atlanta, where they would start up the process again.

By that time, though, Johnston was gone. He was replaced by John B. Hood, who was put in command to attack, and so attack he did, thus hastening the end of the war. We'll be back for those battles, I imagine - but Hood was a superb division commander who was completely lost as an army commander. Though again - he was put in command to attack, and he did what he was expected to - the strategy was a disaster for the south - they were outnumbered in Georgia 2 to 1 or more, and never had a chance. Johnston, for all his flaws, could string the thing out, which in the end was the only hope the South had...

And so... Sherman's campaign in the west was a very different kind of campaign from the east, for many reasons. The personalities of the commanders certainly mattered - Johnston was defensive minded and cagy where Lee was aggressive, and willing to gamble to win, and Grant was as aggressive as Lee, while Sherman was more of a planner. But as much as that, the land itself mattered. Virginia was a fairly constricted theater - there wasn't a lot of room to move. And everything led to Richmond (strategically at least) - there was only so far you could move back. In the west, Johnston had plenty of land to trade for time; Sherman had room to move around him. The war in the west featured its share of bloody fighting, but it was also shaped by the spaces of the west - it was a war of marching and logistics. The South survived there due the spaces the Union had to cover; the Union marched and turned the South out of positions.

And finally - this campaign was like the eastern campaign in being sustained - once the armies started, they kept going. By this time, the campaign had been going two months - it could continue for another two months before Atlanta fell. In its way, it was groping toward modern warfare itself.

Lie Down, You damned fools, you'll never take them forts

Today marks the 150th anniversary of the end of the first stage of the battle of Petersburg, in the Civil War. It is also the day my great-great grandfather was wounded, part of the attack by the 1st Maine Heavy Artillery, the most severe of a number of similar one sided fights on this day.

The battle of Petersburg was the last of Grant's attempts to get around Lee in Virginia in 1864. It was his most successful as well - but like the others, ended in stalemate. He had tried again and again - but various factors, from Lee's ability to react to the Army of the Potomac's bad habits, to the messy command relationship between Grant and Meade and their underlings, every attempt had been thwarted. But they got closer every time - the Yankees had chances at Cold Harbor that they missed, but things were closer. After that - Grant planned this stage more closely. He got his men out of their lines at Cold Harbor, and stole a march on Lee - getting a good chunk of his army over the James river into position to attack Petersburg before Lee could react. They had chances - the city was held by a scratch force, and it took a took a couple days for serious reinforcements to reach the confederate lines - but once again, the union army failed to take advantage of their chances. Baldy Smith arrived, almost took the city, but paused; other men came up - and a number of attacks were attempted - but nothing broke through, though the rebels were forced to pull back to a series of defensive lines. It was only on the 18th that the Union mounted a serious attack - and by then, the confederates were dug in deep, and had started to get Lee's men into lines - and the results were the same as at all the other battles in the spring of 1864. No one was going to break a well entrenched line - and they didn't.

After this, Grant stopped trying to get around Lee. He dug in and held the rebels in place, and stayed for the rest of the war. There would be a couple more attacks - there would be one big attack, at the Crater, in July - but from this point on, Grant wa]as willing to stay where he was and keep Lee there as well. Strategically, the idea was a good one - Lee had nowhere to go - no option but to defend Petersburg and Richmond at all costs. So Grant kept him there - let the rest of the armies settle the issue. Things settled down into trench warfare - another hint of things to come, that no one quite paid attention to, with disastrous results 40 years later.

Cold Harbor

Today in the Civil War was the climax of the Battle of Cold Harbor. It's an infamous day - another frontal assault by the Union army on entrenched Confederates, that ended in slaughter. There was a kind of traditional story - that the Union lost some 7000 men, in about 15 minutes of fighting - Gordon Rhea suggests that the numbers were really about half that. (I've been reading Rhea all spring - that explains why so many of these Grant posts, and no Sherman posts; since Sherman was busy this whole while as well. But all those Rhea books to read!) While that makes the carnage a little less awful, it's still pretty horrific - and the battle still plays as something of a precursor to the Somme.

The best thing about Rhea's account, though, is that he covers the whole campaign. I won't do so here - but the fact is, that this was the end of a week or so of marching and fighting, with Grant trying to get around Lee, Lee trying to head him off. That was the pattern of the whole campaign, really - Grant tried to get around Lee, Lee headed him off. Grant usually managed to steal a march on Lee - over and over, he gave him the slip - but a combination of sloppy planning, very bad coordination by the Union high command, excess of caution on the Union side at times, plus a bit of bad weather and luck, and especially Lee's ability to react to threats, and his soldiers' ability to march and dig, meant Lee ended up cutting him off, every time, forcing another confrontation over trenches. They did it at Spotsylvania, where Grant tried to hammer his way through with - well - some success, but nothing that lasted. They almost did it at the North Anna, but Grant realized he'd divided his forces around Lee's army (and the North Anna river), and got out as quick as he could. So they did it at Cold Harbor - marching south, Lee following, all of them coming together at Cold Harbor - Lee digging in - Grant attacking... stalemate. It wouldn't be the last time it happened.

Rhea goes through the minutia of the campaign - the skirmishes and marches, the commanders' thought processes, the breakdowns of communication. By this time in the war, there isn't all that much drama to the big confrontations - once the full armies were involved, they were usually dug in deep, and this is what happened - whoever left their trenches to attack got smoked. So the maneuver and the attempts to get at parts of the other side are where the challenge was. Oddly - the nature of battle in 1864 turned the war into a matter of position and movement, more than it had been. That was Sherman's campaign - flank the rebels out of their holes; and Johnston's - retreat to new holes to cu them off. Grant and Lee were probably not all that suited to it - both of them liked to get at the other guy and give them a thrashing - but they were also very good at it, conceptually at least. Though reading about the movements of the Army of the Potomac in the spring of 1864 is a painful thing - logistical carelessness and confusion, missed opportunities and so on. The only comfort is that for all their reputation, Lee's army didn't do much better - they were better at getting where they needed to be when they knew where they had to be - but by this time, Lee's subordinates were badly eroded, and Lee himself was breaking down. They did all they could to head off the Yankees.

Finally - the other thing Rhea's account does is show some of the details of the fighting in this time. For example, the disparity in casualties between veteran units and new units. I have something of a personal stake in this, since my great great grandfather was in a heavy artillery regiment - his is a recurring story. And it was played out here: a unit was ordered to attack - they went out, the veteran rather quickly determined if they had any chance, and if not, went to ground - the rookies and the heavy artillery men kept going, bravely forward. And so - Rhea claims that 900 of the II corps' 2500 casualties came from 2 regiments; half the 2500 came from a total of 5 regiments. By this time in the war, the men, if not the generals (and especially not the new regiments, who hadn't been doing this for 3 years), knew the futility of attacking trenches.

Harris Farm

The Battle of Spotsylvania is just about done in 1864, but this morning, 150 years ago, there was one last fight. Lee sent Richard Ewell's corps (which had been chopped to pieces at the Battle of the Bloody Angle) on a kind of reconnaissance in force - march around the right flank of the Union army, see if they could find out what Grant was up to (Grant was up to something), and maybe cut them off and force them to change their plans. Ewell did so - and found the right rear of the Union army fairly open. His men ran into a brigade of Heavy Artillery regiments - men who had enlisted as artillerymen, had spent most of the war posted in the Washington defenses, but were converted to infantry in 1864 and sent off to die with Grant in Virginia. There were, as it happened, more men in this brigade's 5 regiments than in all of Ewell's corps - but when the rebels found them, they didn't think about that. They were confident, and they were fighting rookies, and they expected to win, so they attacked - which turned into a hard little battle. The raw artillerymen fought, not always well - but they held - and eventually reinforcements arrived, and the rebels did well to get away.

One of the regiments there, seeing action for the first time, was the 1st Maine Heavy Artillery. I mentioned them last year - my great-great-grandfather was there. This was their first battle - like the other heavies, they stood up to the attack - unfortunately, like the other heavies, they stood up a bit too literally. By 1864, infantrymen had pretty much learned not to fight in the open unless they had no choice - even in a battle line, veterans would do all they could to find cover, at least kneel, make themselves small - anything except stand in well dressed 18th century style battle lines and blast it out with men who'd been at this for 3 years. But that is what the heavies did. Stood and fought - and eventually chased the rebels off - but took a beating doing it. The 1st Maine brought 1800 men into the fight (more than some of Ewell's divisions, the one at the point of the mule shoe on May 12, anyway) - they lost 523. (Per Gordon Rhea.) That would prove to be just a warm up for what would happen to them at Petersburg - but it's staggering.

My great great grandfather came out unscathed - he would't be so lucky in a month, though he would survive... Not so John P. Higgins, ae 17 yrs. 2 mos.



Meanwhile, though this delayed Grant's plans, it didn't stop them - he was done with Spotsylvania, and soon would be heading south, looking to lure Lee out of his trenches, make him fight in the open. And while he never managed to get him in the open, he did, increasingly, manage to control where the fighting would take place, until he had backed Lee into a corner at Petersburg. Though a lot of men would die on the way...

Spotsylvania Courthouse

Today, May 12, 186, the Battle of Spotsylvania Courthouse reached its climax.

My last couple Civil War posts have had a bit more to them - I've been thinking about the future, about how war will develop in the next 50 years after this, dropping hints about WWI and the trenches. Well - you can probably say that Spotsylvania is where the previews of coming attractions really started. It's there in the widespread and permanent use of fieldworks; it's there in the murderous, and hopeless attacks on trenches; and it's there in the sustained combat. I mentioned it after the Wilderness - that Grant changed the nature of the war, by not stopping after a battle - and when the armies get to Spotsylvania, that gets ratcheted up another notch. The armies arrived, fought - the Confederates dug in and the Yankees attacked; both sides dug in, and the Federals kept on attacking, over and over, day after day, attack after attack. And when Grant finally had enough of it - he started trying to move to a new position to attack again - not after a week or a month, but the next day. And on and on it went.

To sketch the events, broadly: Grant marched around the Wilderness, angling for the crossroads at Spotsylvania. Lee figured out where he was headed and got there first - the two armies ran into one another, fought, dug in, fought some more. Grant brought up his army - I already said this, didn't I? attacked. But by now the rebels were dug in, and were able to demolish any attacks. Grant tried going around their left, but Lee attacked there as well, and that fell apart. Grant sent Burnside against the rebel right, and might have been able to achieve something there, but Burnside was about as incompetent an officer as either side left in positions of authority for most of the war, so nothing happened. So Grant tried more head on attacks, without much success - he kept trying to get the whole army to attack at once, figuring they had huge numerical advantages and they should be able to find a weak point, but it never worked that way. Though things did happen - more later, but on May 10, Emery Upton, a Bright Young Man, launched an attack that broke the confederate line, but failed, due to lack of support; so Grant organized another attack on the same principals for the 12th - which also broke the line, and then bogged down, for lack of support... (Read Bob Bateman's post on Upton here.)

It was an ugly battle, Spotsylvania. (I've been reading Gordon Rhea's books on the 1864 campaign - depressing, but fascinating reading.) It's not Grant's finest hour, nor the Army of the Potomac's. Grant's decision to go south lifted the army's spirits - but it didn't solve the problems that had emerged in the Wilderness. Grant was increasingly making decisions and giving orders - but he still left things to Meade and the corps commanders, and they did not generally share Grant's aggression. Maybe because Grant was trying not to take over the army, maybe for other reasons, his planning was slipshod and careless - orders were vague or impossible and often got crossed up - with the result that the Federals were constantly losing the race to whatever spot they aimed for, were constantly attacking without preparation, without coordination, never coming close to getting their numbers into play at once. And since Grant was determined to try - it meant they kept attacking trenches, and kept getting shot to hell with no hope. They never quite shook that sort of thing - though later in the campaign, as Grant got his bearings, it seemed, the effect grew even more stark - at Cold Harbor and Petersburg, Grant stole a march on Lee - got his men to their objectives ahead of Lee - and then frittered the advantages away, and ended in bloodbaths. But that's still to come.

But there is a common theme, and it's a theme that also hints at what happens in 1914: it was possible to break trenches - the Union did it twice at Spotsylvania. It was possible to maneuver, get around the enemy - but almost impossible to stay there. The Army of the Potomac never really solved the problem of command, at the broader, operational level - and no one really solved the problem of how to move men through a battlefield to take advantage of the advantages they could get. Not in 1864, not in 1914.

So how could you break a strong trench line? Well - let's go to Emory Upton: what did he do? He proposed taking a force in as fast as possible, on as narrow a front as possible, pile-driving through the line. Basically, a form of attacking in column, instead of line - make a narrow front, move fast, break through and exploit the break. It worked - partly because Upton prepared the force for the attack: they deliberately chose the ground, they prepared the men making the attack, his superiors gave him a large enough force to do what he planned to do. And it worked, perfectly - they broke through - they started rolling up the rebel lines on either side of the breach - but it came to nothing. No one came to support them - the attacks that were supposed to happen after hue attacked either had already happened (and gone to nothing) or didn't happen... so back he went. But Grant was paying attention, and on the 12th he tried it again, this time with an entire army corps.

And - again - it worked. There was some luck in play this time. The attack was launched against a salient in Lee's lines; and Lee had guessed wrong about Grant's intentions, and pulled his artillery out of the salient, thinking he would need a head start on pursuing Grant. That made a big difference - artillery plays holy hell with columns of men (a big reason you saw so little fighting in columns in the Civil War). In any case - the II corps attacked at dawn, May 12 - again, in deep stacked masses of men, coming straight on to the tip of the rebel salient, following as much of Upton's pattern as possible, moving fast, moving as silently as possible - and they broke straight through and rolled it up with ease. And then? They piled in, broke the line, routed the front line of the rebel army - but were so broken up by the attack, that they could not keep going. I think this problem was somewhat inherent in Civil War era tactics - you had to attack in formation to be effective. You had to attack in a line to bring enough firepower to bear - since the rate of fire was too slow to sustain a really killing fire from a skirmish line. The problem is, a line is an easy target for another line of men - the line behind a pile of dirt is going to win that fight. So you could attack in column, mass formations like Upton's and Hancock's (II corps) - they broke the lines, but they lost all formation when they did. They needed to transform the spearhead into a firing line - they had to do it under fire in a killing zone. Suffice it to say, they did not succeed.

There were reasons. Certainly the Confederate response was one - they rushed men in and fought desperately to seal the breach. And of course, the attack had disordered the attackers. This was made worse by the attack's success - the whole II corps went in, all of them - and they were all caught in the confusion. What it added up to was an inability to shift men from the assault to exploitation of the break. Maybe they didn't expect a breakthrough - at least not the kind they got. No one thought about how to how to get another line of men into the battle after the breakthrough, in a position to attack the next line. But here again - while it's easy, and justified, to look at the shortcomings of the Union high command, I think you can ask yourself - how, exactly, could they have gotten another line in there? Grant tried to get his whole army to attack at the same time - to pin down the rebel army to allow any breakthrough to lead to a large one - but the army didn't do this, and it's doubtful it would have done any good if they did. Men in trenches were going to execute men attacking them in all but the most extraordinary cases. Maybe if they had planned some kind of attack in echelon, like Longstreet planned to do the second day of Gettysburg - when one unit started to waver, they were hit on the flank by another attack. Some of that happened at the Angle - but didn't extend beyond it. What was needed was a way to get troops through the Angle in good order - they needed to be able to move troops through the battlefield to the front, still intact, to attack Gordon (the Confederate general leading the counterattack), and then onwards, breaking Lee in half. But even with a plan - could they have done it?

They hadn't figured it out by WWI. It took a while to figure out how to break a line there - they tried frontal attacks, suppression fire (artillery and gas), all kinds of things. The front waves tended to get massacred - but even when they figured out how to take a line of trenches, they did not figure out how to get beyond it. There was no way to move fast enough to get at then before they built a new line. When breakthroughs occurred - they foundered for exactly this reason: that by the time you were through the first line, the second line was forming. It was impossible to get troops forward fast enough to stop this. Impossible - it wasn't quite a matter of tactics: it was physically impossible to get men across the battlefield before a new line, and a counterattack formed. And while Spotsylvania didn't quite pose the physical barriers to movement that the aftermath of a WWI battlefield did, it came close - especially given that it poured rain all day on the 12th of May. None of this changed, then, until tanks appeared, airplanes, ways to get past lines, or break up defensive lines before they could form. When you read about battles like Spotsylvania, or some of the fighting in WWI, you start to realize - there was nothing else they could do, except not fight. Once the armies dug in, they weren't going anywhere, until someone invented a better machine, or someone's economy collapsed. Or - as Grant eventually did: pin the enemy's best army in place, and let your vast resource advantages chew up the rest of the country.

And so: May 12, 1864 - Hancock's men broke through the rebel lines, but their attack bogged down. The rebels counterattacked, but only so far. The two sides basically hunkered down, in some places on opposite sides of the original trench lines, and proceeded to spend the rest of the day and night killing one another in the rain. a full day of face to face, almost hand to hand combat, neither side moving, or capable of moving the other guy, Grant feeding in fresh troops - Lee hanging on with what he had, while his reserved dug a new line in the rear. And that was the battle of the Bloody Angle.

And then? they kept at it - Grant trying to move around to find some weak spot, though much hindered by bad weather and a week of bloodletting. Lee trying to anticipate Grant's moves, avoid being caught out. And onward, until Grant decided to move south again. And another stage in the campaign was underway...

Yellow Tavern

Today is the anniversary of the Battle of Yellow Tavern - where Phil Sheridan and the Union cavalry beat the Confederate cavalry, and JEB Stuart was killed. It was an ambiguous victory - Sheridan's raid was big and splashy, but probably did the Army of the Potomac more harm than good, taking away their cavalry, their intelligence, in much the way Stuart's raid during the Gettysburg campaign took away Lee's intelligence, and handicapped him. Sheridan's men got Stuart, but didn't really break the rebel cavalry, who continued to perform their main function (scouting and the like), without the temptation to go riding off on romantic adventures, like this one.

But - but. First - the raid did establish the union cavalry as a military force to be reckoned with. At the beginning of the war, they had been at a terrible disadvantage vs. the south - by 1863, things were starting to come around (Joe Hooker did a lot to turn them into a real force); they fought a number of successful battles in 63, and played a significant part at Gettysburg (holding off the initial advances for a couple hours until the infantry came up, and later driving Stuart off the union rear). And this, in 1864, more or less confirmed the point: they were a force to be reckoned with on the battle field.

But that also indicates something about how Sheridan thought about his cavalry, and something about the changes in the nature of the war. He was an infantry general in the west - and the truth is, he treated his cavalry corps as something very close to a mounted infantry unit. He expected to fight with them - attack; use their mobility to get into positions to cause serious problems to the enemy; and to be able to hold their own in any situation. And they did it, for a number of reasons - some of them technological. Union cavalry were increasingly armed with Spencer rifles - 7 shot repeaters that used metal cartridges - that meant they could put out a massive firepower - and could do it with guns that didn't foul because of wet. The Spencers and other carbines didn't have the range that rifled muskets had - and cavalry had a hard time mustering the mass firepower that usually made the difference in the Ciil War - but they could put out so much lead, they could hold their own.

The power of repeaters was shown in the west - Wilder's Brigade had Spencers, which they used to great effect; at Chickamauga, the 21st Ohio regiment was armed with Colt repeaters, that allowed them to do immense damage. Sheridan was a fighter - he used the cavalry corps almost like one of those mounted infantry units - fast, mobile, and able to outshoot anything they ran into. It didn't really bear fruit in early 1864 - but it became more and more effective as the year went along, and by the spring of 65, Sheridan would be able to use his troopers, and indeed, much of the union infantry, in that kind of mobile, high firepower way. It didn't quite unbalance the Civil war - there weren't enough of the repeaters around, and the tactics weren't there yet. But it is another of the things that hint at the future. Movement and firepower - well - a future that didn't quite come into being until the internal combustion engine replaced the horse. But the idea was there...

Battle of the Wilderness

150 years ago, The Battle of the Wilderness began. It was a nasty, bloody contest, though most significant for what happened when it ended - because it changed the shape of the war - maybe of war itself.

The battle itself was a nasty piece of work. It got its name from where it took place, in The Wilderness - the same second growth woodland where the Battle of Chancellorsville happened the previous year. It was a hideous place to fight - dense woodland, full of cuts and streams and swamps, where no one could see anything, generals had the devil's time maintaining control of their men, no one could move through all the woods, and once the shooting started, the whole thing caught fire and turned it into a hellscape. No one really intended to fight there - Grant's idea was to march throughout the wilderness before Lee could get to him, to fight on the open ground to the south. But Lee got wind of the movement and moved to block it, attacking the Army of the Potomac in the woods. And that's how it went.

There were two main roads running throughout he woods, and the battle was fought almost as two separate engagements on and around those roads. On the union right, Warren’s V corps ran into Ewell's corps, entrenched in the jungle - Warren was ordered to attack, and did, but in an uncoordinated and piecemeal fashion that gained no ground and led to great slaughter. On the union left, a separate battle developed between other Union troops (Hancock’s II corps, mainly) and AP Hill’s men - here, strong Union numeric advantages went to nothing because of the mix of bad coordination and the impassable terrain the battle was fought over. Both sides fought until dark and then waiting to do it again in the morning.

They picked up where they left off the second day. The union left (especially) tried to get into position for an early attack, but things bogged down, and dragged out - but they did finally get their numbers to bear, and started to drive Hill's men back. And finally, it went beyond that - they drove Hill back, and broke the lines, and finally came close to a complete breakthrough. But in the best of circumstances, in the Civil War, any battle demolished the formations of the men fighting, the winners as much as the losers. Over and over, you read of attacks that shatter the enemy, but peter out because the victors are as disorganized as the losers. And here, the Union army was driving them, but they were coming apart - and this was far worse than the usual circumstances. Command and control were almost impossible to maintain in the wilderness; combined with the tendency for organization to disintegrate in the face of too much success or failure, the Union attack was ripe for the picking.... And they ran square into Longstreet’s corps, which had spent the previous day slogging around in the woods, far from the battle, only to turn up here and now, just when it counted. They hit the union army when it was disorganized, out of control, and worn out - and blew the line to shreds. They drove them back to where they started, but the Yankees had fieldworks built there - so when the rebels came in the Yankees were waiting. And the same thing happened that usually happened when men attacked entrenchments in the Civil War. They were wrecked.

And that was that. They hung around another day, but neither side had much stomach left for fighting. The battle had a lot in common with Chickamauga, actually, as well as Chancellorsville. Much like Chickamauga, this was a terrible ground for a fight; much of the battle was the same kind of back and forth uncoordinated slog; and once again, it was a Longstreet attack (or counter attack) that caved in the Federal forces; and that led to the same last ditch stand by the Union that wrecked the southerners almost as bad as they were wrecked. HOwever, unlike Chickamauga, where the Army of the Cumberland was wrecked by the battle, The Army of the Potomac was still going strong. They were shot up - but they had a lot of men, and whatever troubles they had at the command level (and they had some pretty serious commend problems in the spring of 1864), they were structurally intact and ready to keep going. In that, this fight looks more like Chancellorsville - hard fighting, a few moments of total disaster, but the army intact and mostly ready for more.

Still, the north had been beaten. Warren’s corps never really got anywhere (getting shot up the first day, then again the second day, then ending the whole thing by getting routed out of their position by a flank attack that only dissolved because of the night time woods.) Hancock on the left had been shot up badly as well. (Sedgwick’s VI corps, and parts of Burnside's IX fought on both sides of the battle, often in the middle between the other two - with no more success than anyone else had.) The Union had been stopped cold, trying to get through the Wilderness, at significant loss. Lee was still waiting with plenty of fight. In the past, when the Yankees invaded the south and lost, they tended to go back home and try again. But this time, everything changed.

The truth is, throughout the war, there were few examples to this point of armies fighting battles and then trying to press their advantage (let alone continuing after a defeat, if they had a choice.) Lee during the Seven Days; Lee after Second Bull Run; Lee after Chancellorsville - Lee, that is. And after victories; not after a defeat. And of course, there was the Vicksburg campaign - a series of coordinated attacks and battles, one after another, with no space given to the confederates to regroup. Which is to say, Grant. And here was Grant again. And while he had been blocked on his first attempt to get into the south, he was not the sort of man who looked at failure as anything forgone. So after a day resting, he got his army up and marching, and turned them south - marching around the Wilderness, headed for Spotsylvania Courthouse.

And that made all the difference. The Army of the Potomac certainly thought so - every account is full of the thrill the men in the ranks felt when they discovered they were heading south, looking to take the battle to the enemy, not go back home and think about what to do next. And this is despite their knowing that this meant blood and death for them. I doubt anyone imagined just how much blood and death would be coming - I don't know how they could, though you might have gotten a notion of it looking at the carnage of Chancellorsville, Gettysburg and Chickamauga - sustained carnage. But the men in the ranks seem to have understood what Grant understood - that you had to fight until you were beat, really beat - and they weren't beat.

Somewhere in here, probably at Spotsylvania in fact, you can see 20th century warfare being born. Spotsylvania, Cold Harbor and Petersburg prefigure WWI, that is certain: trench warfare; extended warfare - those are all new. But that change started in the Wilderness. Civil War battles tended to be battles - armies marched around to get to a position to fight - they fought - then went where they went to think about what to do next. Other than Lee at the 7 days and Grant at Vicksburg, there aren’t a lot of examples of armies fighting a sustained series of battles, day after day until the issue was decided. Even when one battle led to another, as Second Bull Run led to Antietam, or Chancellorsville to Gettysburg, or Chickamauga led to Chattanooga - there were gaps. Armies separated and began new campaigns. But not so much here. Grant headed off around Lee - Lee moved to cut him off again - they ran into each other and did it again a couple days later. Then Grant moves, Lee moves, they tried again - not quite coming to blows at North Anna, but then moving again - another slaughter at Cold Harbor - move again - Petersburg. And then siege.

It was different. Grant started the battle and kept at it. So did Lee, though he had less choice. But this period of the war, changed the way war was waged. It became steady, endless, relentless. Even before this, it was very difficult to win a battle and win a war, though everyone still seemed to think it was possible. Europe got fooled by Sedan, a big decisive battle that sort of stopped the Franco-Prussian war: only sort of, since the French people repudiated the government that surrendered and kept on fighting... But it did leave Europeans thinking they could win a decisive battle and through it a war. But it didn't work like that anymore, and wouldn't until the Blitzkriegs. In 1864, Grant pressed on, fight by fight, trying to get around Lee, but always ready to fight when they met again. In the end, he settled for a siege, to keep Lee in place while Sherman, later Sheridan, beat the South - but either way, he waged an endless campaign. As did Sherman - who don’t have to fight Johnson for every river crossing as Grant did Lee - but the principals were the same. Move around this line, confront the next line. Sherman was less willing to attack directly, Johnston was less willing to force a fight than Lee was, and both of them had more room to move around in. So there was less bloodshed in the west - but there were no rests, no stops. Sherman would push on until he had won - as Grant did.